The Highlights of the 3rd Democratic Presidential Debate

On Saturday night, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Bernie Sanders faced off in an occasionally spirited third Democratic presidential debate — the second-to-last before the Iowa caucuses. The event spanned issues such as national security, Donald Trump, gun control, and the recent DNC data breach. Clinton once again walked away as the likely winner, delivering confident responses across a range of topics — with the exception of a less-than-convincing defense of the Libya intervention. She also managed to insert what was surprisingly the night’s only Star Wars reference, using “and may the Force be with you” in place of “and may God bless America” at the end of her closing remarks, which also closed the debate. Here’s a look at some of the otherhighlights:

Everyone was united against Donald Trump, but no other GOP candidates received any attention.
Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump had zero fans on the stage, and the front-runner was the only Republican candidate specifically mentioned by the Democrats — something that will surely please Trump and dismay the rest of the GOP field. In particular, it was Trump’s perceived bigotry towards Muslims that drew the most ire, with Clinton calling Trump “ISIS’s best recruiter” while insisting that his rhetoric was making the world a more dangerous place. Clinton also said that extremists were “showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists,” but so far there does not seem to be any evidence that that has actuallyhappened.

For his part, Sanders wanted Trump supporters to know that their candidate only cared about rich people, and added that the GOP front-runner’s inflammatory rhetoric was designed to take advantage of a very dangerous moment in Americanhistory:

Somebody like a Trump comes along and says: ‘I know the answers! The answer is that all of the Mexicans, they’re criminals and rapists. We gotta hate the Mexicans, those are your enemies. We hate all the Muslims, because all the Muslims are terrorists, we gotta hate the Muslims.’ Meanwhile the rich get richer and the poor getpoorer.

Meanwhile, O’Malley declared that American values must never surrender to racists or the the “fascist pleas of billionaires with bigmouths.”

ABC was ready — but not waiting — for Hillary, and later asked a stupid question about first spouses. Hillary Clinton was involved in probably the two strangest moments of the debate, both the fault of ABC. To start, after the first of three commercial-break intermissions (complete with awkward sportscast-like commentary), ABC returned with only Sanders and O’Malley present on stage. Moderator David Muir awkwardly acknowledged Clinton’s absence, only indicating that she would rejoining them shortly, and then moved into a question for Bernie Sanders. About a minute later, mid-question, Clinton walked out from backstage to applause from the crowd and offered a “sorry” when she reached her podium, drawing laughter. This was the second debate in which Clinton had been late returning from a break, but why ABC chose to resume the broadcast when all the candidates weren’t present isunclear.

Even less clear is why ABC thought it made sense to ask, as one of their final questions of the night, about potential first-spouse duties. On a night when neither climate change nor China came up in the debate, producers instead chose to ask the candidates whether the role of presidential spouses needed to change, though they tried to make it sound like the question — originally to Clinton — was not connected to the idea that a man might be soon taking the role. In her response, Clinton indicated she would definitely deploy Bill on serious duties, but also joked that “with respect to my own husband, I am probably still going to pick the flowers and the china for state dinners and stuff like that.” It was a decent quip, but she arguably should have just deflected the question entirely, as her campaign quickly did following theexchange:

Bernie Sanders apologized for his campaign’s role in this week’s data breach. The buzz going into the debate — from the Sanders campaign — was that their candidate would use the debate to vigorously push back against the Democratic establishment in light of the campaign’s dustup with the DNC over Wednesday’s data breach, during which Sanders campaign staffers had downloaded some Clinton campaign data. Sanders did partake in some finger-wagging, but pretty much only in response to the first question of the debate, which was specifically about the incident. He acknowledged the breach, both data and ethical, and, when prompted, apologized to both Clinton and his supporters for what had happened. He nonetheless also insisted, as his campaign has over the last few days, that it was the DNC and their data vendor who were most at fault for the breach, and he decried the DNC’s resulting one-day suspension of his campaign’s data access. Later on everyone on stage agreed it was not an important topic, and indeed it did not come up again. Whether the Sanders and Clinton campaigns will subsequently tone down their mostly Tweeted rhetoric remains to be seen, but there also came news after the debate that two more Sanders campaign staffers had been suspended as a result of the breach, following the firing of the campaign’s national data director onFriday.

Martin O’Malley probably didn’t win anyone over. Right out of the gate, an overly-animated O’Malley was trying to bolster his severely flagging campaign and outright bluster his way into the conversation. After the very first question — about this week’s DNC data breach — he delivered what was presumably prepared outrage about Sanders and Clinton bickering over such an unimportant story — except they hadn’t just been bickering. Things only got worse from there, as O’Malley tried to interrupt other participants only to be repeatedly — sometimes brutally — rebuked by the moderators and, at one point, his opponents, who teamed up to dismiss O’Malley after listening to him loudly attack them on gun control. Sanders responded to that outburst, in his classic Brooklyn accent, “Whoa, whoa, whoa … let’s calm down a bit, Martin,” and then Clinton added, “Let’s tell the truth, Martin.” (It’s worth noting, however, that Sanders then went off on his own not-terribly-calm tangent defending himself.) For the rest of the debate, O’Malley was indeed calmer, but continued to make few contributions ofconsequence.

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THE FEED

9/14/2019

Another potential misdeed

The nation’s top intelligence official is illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint, possibly to protect President Donald Trump or senior White House officials, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff alleged Friday.

Schiff issued a subpoena for the complaint, accusing acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire of taking extraordinary steps to withhold the complaint from Congress, even after the intel community’s inspector general characterized the complaint as credible and of “urgent concern.”

“A Director of National Intelligence has never prevented a properly submitted whistleblower complaint that the [inspector general] determined to be credible and urgent from being provided to the congressional intelligence committees. Never,” Schiff said in a statement. “This raises serious concerns about whether White House, Department of Justice or other executive branch officials are trying to prevent a legitimate whistleblower complaint from reaching its intended recipient, the Congress, in order to cover up serious misconduct.”

Schiff indicated that he learned the matter involved “potentially privileged communications by persons outside the Intelligence Community,” raising the specter that it is “being withheld to protect the President or other Administration officials.”

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group on Saturday attacked two plants at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including the world’s biggest petroleum processing facility, in a strike that three sources said had disrupted output and exports.

Two sources close to the matter said 5 million barrels per day of crude production had been impacted — close to half of the kingdom’s output or 5% of global oil supply.

The pre-dawn drone attack on the Saudi Aramco facilities set off several fires, although the kingdom, the world’s largest oil exporter, later said these were brought under control.

Candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination are sprinting from coast to coast in search of campaign donations over the next 18 days, moving urgently to stockpile cash for their big fall push — and to avoid a death spiral that a weak third-quarter fundraising tally might prompt. …

Still, Democratic donors have expressed nervousness in recent weeks that some presidential hopefuls could post disappointing totals, compounding the candidates’ broader struggles. July and August tend to be slow for fundraising, with many people on vacation and tuned out of politics. The large and unpredictably fluid field also has made it difficult for donors to commit to a candidate.

“The third quarter number, from a finance standpoint, will define the narrative throughout the course of the fall, when these questions about viability for so many of the candidates are so real, especially in the second and third tiers,” said Rufus Gifford, the finance director for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaignand a donor to at least three candidates so far this year.

While MIT engages in damage control following revelations the university’s Media Lab accepted millions of dollars in funding from Jeffrey Epstein, a renowned computer scientist at the university has fanned the flames by apparently going out of his way to defend the accused sex trafficker—and child pornography in general.

Richard Stallman has been hailed as one of the most influential computer scientists around today and honored with a slew of awards and honorary doctorates, but his eminence in the academic computer science community came into question Friday afternoon when purportedly leaked email excerpts showed him suggesting one of Epstein’s alleged victims was “entirely willing.”

An MIT engineering alumna, Selam Jie Gano, published a blog post calling for Stallman’s removal from the university in light of his comments, along with excerpts from the email in which Stallman appeared to defend both Epstein and Marvin Minsky, a lauded cognitive scientist and founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab who was accused of assaulting Virginia Giuffre.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young liberal icon from New York, has endorsed Senator Ed Markey’s reelection bid next year, as Representative Joe Kennedy III considers challenging Markey for what promises to be the nation’s most competitive congressional primary.

Ocasio-Cortez and Markey have worked together as the primary sponsors of the Green New Deal, the signature legislative issue for both lawmakers.

ABC’s coverage of the 10-candidate forum draws the largest preliminary ratings for any debate so far this cycle.

ABC and Univision scored strong ratings Thursday with their coverage of the third Democratic presidential primary debate.

The debate, featuring 10 candidates and current frontrunners Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren sharing the stage for the first time, drew a 10.0 household rating in Nielsen’s 56 metered markets. That’s 23 percent higher than the 8.1 NBC got for part two of the first debate on June 27, but about 25 percent lower than combined metered-market average for NBC and MSNBC. That telecast ended up with 18.1 million viewers across NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo.

Beginning speech to Concerned Women of America, @SecPompeo says “this is such a beautiful hotel. The guy who owns it must gonna be successful along the way,” he says, without mentioning @realDonaldTrump by name. “That was for the Washington Post,” he says of his remark. pic.twitter.com/vPYp9vYE9y

Child care, a key issue for many Americans, is getting little attention at the debates

Millions of Americans struggle to find decent, affordable child care every year. But when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tried to bring up the subject during Thursday’s Democratic debate, in response to a question about education, a moderator cut her off.

“Start with our babies by providing universal child care for every baby age 0 to 5, universal pre-K for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old in this country,” Warren said, just getting on a roll when ABC moderator Linsey Davis interrupted. “Thank you, senator,” Davis said.

Davis was just following the rules: Warren’s time for the response had lapsed. But the moment was a perfect metaphor for the attention child care and other work-family issues have gotten in these debates ― or, more accurately, the attention they have not gotten in these debates.

After the debate, Castro is being criticized for his kamikaze attack on Biden, while journalists are toiling away trying to transcribe Biden’s “record player” response

Biden was asked whether he still held these attitudes: “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?” What follows is a transcript of his rambling answer (I have omitted nothing), which for some reason includes references to record players and Venezuela:

Well, they have to deal with the — look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. From the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining banks, making sure we are in a position where — look, you talk about education. I propose is we take the very poor schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level.

Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3, 4 and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school.

Social workers help parents deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t know what to play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time we get there.